Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial

About

Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial is the fifth installment of the museum’s signature contemporary design exhibition series. With a focus on aesthetic innovation, Beauty celebrates design as a creative endeavor that engages the mind, body, and senses. Curated by Andrea Lipps, Assistant Curator, and Ellen Lupton, Senior Curator of Contemporary Design, the exhibition features more than 250 works by 63 designers and teams from around the globe, and is organized around seven themes: extravagant, intricate, ethereal, transgressive, emergent, elemental, and transformative.

The exhibition is installed on the first and third floors of the museum and offers an immersive, multisensory experience that guides the visitor through a dramatic procession of the individual works. With projects ranging from experimental prototypes and interactive games to fashion ensembles and architectural interventions, Beauty presents works of astonishing form and surprising function while examining the essential question: “Why beauty now?”

free class

A half-hour online class on Skillshare with curators Andrea Lipps and Ellen Lupton, who discuss beauty as an inspiration for design and engage viewers in a design project to explore personal expressions of beauty.

Exhibition catalog

Select pages from the catalog

Beauty’s catalog is a tactile, fluid, and provocative interpretation of the Triennial’s central themes. Designed by Kimberly Varella, founder of Content Object, the book provides unexpected points of entry and plays with the concepts of beauty by using reflective surfaces, weaving pages together with hot pink thread, and grouping rich material in pink-tinted pages in the “heart” of the book from which all else flows. Each section includes the individual designers in conversation with the curators about her or his process and interpretation of beauty’s differing forms. Punctuated by lush imagery of the individual works, the catalog is the ultimate feast for the senses.

BEAUTY VIDEO

Game Changers: Jenny Sabin on High-Performance Architecture

Triennial designer Jenny Sabin is at the forefront of a new direction for twenty-first century architectural practice with work that investigates the intersections of architecture and science, and applies insights and theories from biology and mathematics to the design of material structures. Her experimental architectural design studio develop models and prototypes for high-tech and high-performance composite fabrics, such as those used for Sabin’s PolyThread Knitted Textile Pavilion, commissioned for Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial.

Design Talks | Materializing Beauty with The Haas Brothers and The Haas Sisters of Monkeybiz

DISEÑO | Emiliano Godoy & Rodrigo Corral

Filmed live at Cooper Hewitt: an evening with acclaimed Latino designers Emiliano Godoy and Rodrigo Corral hosted by Ellen Lupton, Senior Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt. Born in Mexico City, Emiliano Godoy develops processes that rely on skilled labor and utilize local materials. Corral is Creative Director of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Creative Director at Large for New Directions in New York City. He also runs Rodrigo Corral Studio.

DESIGN TALKS | RICHARD NIESSEN MEETS EUCLID

Two short talks and a moderated conversation with Senior Curator of Contemporary Design Ellen Lupton, featuring graphic designers Richard Niessen and Craig Welsh on the themes of ornament, type, and history in contemporary graphic design.

Special Thanks

Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial is made possible by generous support from Edward and Helen Hintz, and Madeleine Rudin Johnson.

Additional funding is provided by Amita and Purnendu Chatterjee, August Heckscher Exhibition Fund, Margery and Edgar Masinter, May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, Inc., Ehrenkranz Fund, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Rockwell Group, Esme Usdan Exhibition Endowment Fund, the Dutch Culture USA program of the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York, and the Consulate General of Finland.